downtime

Yesterday, I finished building a new and improved WordPress server. This means I had to migrate the serenity-networks.com WordPress installation from the old server to the new. I wanted to do this with zero downtime, which is actually quite easy and straightforward if you have a plan in place. The process works something like this.

Export the database from the old server using phpmyadmin

Copy all WordPress files from the old server to the new server

Import the database on the new server using phpmyadmin

Add temporary hostname entry into your local hosts file

You might be asking yourself, why on earth would I add a hostname entry into the hosts file on my workstation? Well, this will allow you to pull your website from the new server without changing your public DNS settings. If you are only hosting one site on the new server, and not using virtual headers, you can skip this step if you like. So lets get it started.

Moving a WordPress site to a new server

The only real requirement, other than a server capable of running WordPress, is having phpmyadmin installed on both of your web servers. Most already do, but if you don’t, click here to learn how. We need this to export and import the WordPress database.

First, log into phpmyadmin on your old server so we can download the WordPress database. It should be pretty obvious which database is for your WordPress instance, but if you aren’t sure you can see the name of it by looking at the wp-config.php file, located in the root of your WordPress installation.

Select your database in the left column and then click the Export tab at the top of the right column. Leave the selection set as Quick, and click Go.